I see this manipulative arguement used all the time with lithium mining.
https://www.gtk.fi/en/research/time-to-wake-up/
"No matter what minerals will be needed, we will need large quantities of them as the renewable power sources like wind and solar, require extensive mineral resources to manufacture the infrastructure for fossil-free energy.
And there is a challenge. Given the estimated required number of Electric Vehicles (EV’s) of different vehicle class, it is clear that there are not enough minerals in the currently reported global reserves to build just one generation of batteries for all EV’s and stationary power storage, in the global industrial ecosystem as it is today."
Also moving pulling back this debate to more general topics:
1.We don't need to replace all cars, many older gas powered cars will still be on the road for a long time which buys time for points 2-4
2. There are other types of batteries, like NiMH, which don't contain lithium. Although these aren't as efficient many hybrids use them, I think the new Mavrick hybrid does (or some truck hybrid)
3. There could be new battery technology that will be invented
4.New technology has helped Tesla make more energy dense batteries and have them last longer
A 2016 model s with the 70kwh battery pack has a 200 miles of range
A 2022 Model s performance with a 98kwh battery pack has a range of 326 miles (this is a touch comparison because the new performance has much more power)
sources: https://www.caranddriver.com/features/a15104936/tesla-model-... https://electrek.co/2016/11/01/breakdown-raw-materials-tesla...
For every 0.6 kg of Uranium it produces, it produces 20kg of copper and 4.5g of silver.
Monosilicon PV is made of sand, copper, silver and aluminum.
A kg of uranium going through a pwr produces about 500GJ (with 3-10% of that being required for milling and enrichment). The 7.5g of silver in the ore that produced that kg of Uranium will produce about 200GJ in its lifetime with technologies in the pipeling that will push this to 400GJ. This silver usage is going down faster than production is increasing. There will be a huge surplus of copper from this source.
The silver is recyclable.
The uranium will require special storage for millenia or reprocessing at a cost not even massively subsidized programs are willing to bear.
The solar energy can be stored in a battery made from sodium, carbon, iron and aluminum. This is basically the composition of dirt. These are being mass produced now and full industrialisation of the supply chain is expected by 2024.
The nuclear reactor requires large quantities of zirconium, molybdenum, chromium, silver, cadmium and many other rare metals. Much of this is radioactive waste at eol.
The nuclear reactor requires more steel than the solar panel requires silicon, and more concrete than the solar panel requires glass and concrete.
A uranium mine can provide nearly as much energy from PV as it does via fission, and will soon produce more. Let that sink in for a bit.
It suffices that readers know they are being trolled.
I'm glad it's getting cheaper, and I'm all for supplementing baseline load with solar, wind, and hydro, but I'm less confident with strategies that ultimately boil down to placing trust in improvements that we may or may not reach.
That's not an assertion that reaching, say, $10/kWh for storage won't be possible, but I think it would be wise to have a plan B in case we're unable to get it lower than, say, $100/kWh.
Not having a Plan B and placing almost all of our eggs in one basket (fossil fuels) is how we got to this point in the first.
Storage is the only compatible solution to renewables (that is not fossil fuels). As far as I know renewables+storage are cheaper than 100% nuclear and much faster to build.
The energy demands in the market right now are very different than what they were even 20 years ago (I mean, who would have imagined crypto mining or large model training in the state it’s in?)
We’re heavily constrained as a society in our use of energy. For example, you don’t just leave the heat/AC on all day when weather conditions demand it, do you?
Similarly, we don’t have massive desalination capacity on the west coast in spite of years of drought with the Pacific right on the coast.
Energy is one of those things that society has no choice but to live within its means on. We can build all the nuclear capacity we want to and yet, may still see future demand in intensive areas such as carbon capture, desalination, supercomputing clusters come up that are great candidates for any buffer capacity we may have, should we be so lucky.
This all goes without mentioning the huge surge of lower income populations that will slowly be increasing consumption over the next few decades. Hundreds of millions(perhaps billions) of people in India, Africa, Asia and South America (The global south) consume very, very little energy today because of financial constraints and development. A lot of these people may not have access to transmission infrastructure for a long time and solar, wind and the like certainly find their use in many such places today.
In short, this is not a zero sum game.
Not only can it be a great source of baseload power, but it can also be turned on and off very rapidly to provide peeking capacity.
Pairs very nicely with Wind and Solar if your country has the right terrain for it (which Sweden does, hydro provides 45% of their current capacity).
Take the hydro which is currently doing baseload, convert as much capacity as possible to peak loads. And replace the lost baseload with new Nuclear.
That way you can unlock even more capacity for more solar and wind (well... that far north, it will be mostly wind)
However, unless time comes when we can deploy multi TWh lithium energy storage (highly unlikely - just look at shortages required for electric cars) or we have grids that can send let's say entire country's worth of capacity from the coast of Norway to Greece on a moment's notice there is no way renewables will ever go beyond few tens of % at the extreme best as measured in proportion of energy actually delivered.
The misinformation on the subject has been pushed very hard in recent years as it benefits many special interest groups. For example those articles we see sometimes about "German's entire electricity supply coming from renewables on a given day" or "40% of all electricity produced came from renewables in first half of a year" fail to mention Germany has Frances heavily nuclear backed supply on one side, its other neighbor's conventional (coal) supplies to lean on so we should really consider the entire system not cherry pick parts that fit our narrative.
Am I against renewables? No, I've invested my own money this year into solar (before the war started so I didn't even know how electricity prices will spike) and I am a big proponent of its use where possible. Unfortunately our grid is not built in a way that allows everyone to have solar. At the same time we don't have enough lithium batteries to meet our transportation needs, so thinking we'll have enough for grid level storage is a pipe dream.
People that are for off lining existing nuclear capacity really achieve only increased use of gas/diesel for energy production as well as diminish our industry's competitiveness in the world through extremely high energy costs. This will have zero impact on climate as China will pick up all the slack we leave regarding co2 emissions and some. In fact it may even be worse, because we could've built same products(steel concrete etc) with a mix of nuclear/renewables/small chunk of conventional generation while they mostly use dirty coal.
All we'll achieve by this self industrial devolution is furthering our dependence on countries like China and Russia.
Having the natural gas in Russia hasn’t really worked out for Sweden. People care about security of supply because national markets are more robust than international ones.
There will be much higher demand of electricity in the close future, e.g. battery factories requires a lot of it.
Carbon free steel is another, true is that some of it the involved companies will provide their own electricity production, but that will not be enough.
But there are also other industry that requires electricity for expansion like food industry, paper mills etc.
Another thing is that Sweden has an unequal distribution of production of electricity, a lot of production (hydro) is far north where fewer live, and little production far south where everyone live.
The nuclear reactors that were shutdown was all in southern Sweden.
It is hard to transport vast amount of electricity from north to south because of limited bandwidth but also because of the newly shutdown nuclear reactors, they provided necessary stability to grid, with them gone it made it harder to transport electricity from north to south.
Another problem is that because of the push on wind power and the shutdown on nuclear power, the electricity system has become much more weather dependent resulting in massive price spikes. That is generally bad for industry that want predictable prices.
This also has the consequence that the electricity price of the continent can infect the price in Sweden because Sweden is connected to the same grid. If temporary shortage in southern Sweden, then import of capacity from the continent is required but with that comes a higher price.
Also, the international spot power market actually started with Nordpool in the nordics, where it expanded to Europe. The countries in Europe buy and sell electricity all the time and it is a tremendous benefit. https://www.nordpoolgroup.com/en/maps/#/nordic
Are you doing any research before you write stuff like this?! It is trivial to show that this statement is false (let's not even get int the at least). Just look at Germanys capacity,
https://www.cleanenergywire.org/factsheets/germanys-energy-c...
Wind and solar are multiple times as big than gas (all other on demand sources are trivial)
Also where are you getting your energy if you need to shut down your nuclear plant for maintanance (or other emergency cases)
Northern Europe for the most part switched over to district and electric heating (direct or air/ground pumps) a long time ago.
And before that you set the lithium battery straw man. Read no further. And you are talking about missinformation.
The sun does, in fact, shine far, far more than enough.
What type of utility scale storage isn't a battery? The answer is, of course: any energy storage setup is a battery[1].
A more generous interpretation of your comment is that you meant won't be chemical batteries.
In which case, I'll bite: what then?
1. Energy storage is the capture of energy produced at one time for use at a later time[1] to reduce imbalances between energy demand and energy production. A device that stores energy is generally called an accumulator or battery.
There are few countries with better opportunities for renewables than Sweden.
Nuclear power is a good idea, but so is wind for Sweden. We already have a lot of wind but high pressure areas with little wind do exist, even in winter. Nuclear looks kind of good from that point of view, but I strongly feel that Sweden is way too small of an actor to buy reactors on her own, and should actually co-order reactors with other countries, getting the costs down (maybe not even costs, but risks. There have been a lots of bankrupted players in nuclear lately).
However this is of course not enough to run industries with high electricity demand, what people tend to forget is that one factory (like melting of aluminum) can consume more electricity in one day than an entire city in a year. For that you need nuclear power or hydro.
The remaining problem is building factories for electrolysis equipment. Building factories takes an appallingly long time. But the problem is only of time, not technical maturity.
Not in northern Europe. For example at the southern most point of Finland there is 3 months in the year when solar produces less than 1% of its name plate capacity. It does get slightly better in the southern part of Sweden but still not that great.
Around Mediterranean is where solar starts to get really good though the Africa side of it is even better.
On the worst winter days, when its -5F, and the energy needs are the highest, there is also no wind.
The Baltic Sea also freezes and there is barely any tidal movement.
There isn't really a renewable that works for Northern European energy needs during winter. Hydro is the exception but it's geo based you can't build unlimited hydroplants and also during winter the water levels are not the highest.